The promised land : the great Black migration and how it changed America

by Nicholas Lemann

Hardcover, 1991

Status

Available

Publication

New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 1991.

Description

A New York Times bestseller, the groundbreaking authoritative history of the migration of African-Americans from the rural South to the urban North. A definitive book on American history, The Promised Land is also essential reading for educators and policymakers at both national and local levels.

User reviews

LibraryThing member ccjolliffe
Little lives rock big boats in Lemann's twofold drama of Pres. Johnson's Great Society venture. Act 1 introduces us to black victims of white progress in the sharecropper South, as they cast their hopes & fates northward to "the promised land" of Chicago in the 1940's. Act 2 presents the political
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quandary of the Johnson and Nixon administrations in confronting the new eruption of poverty & black anger in urban America. Act 3 returns us to the streets of Chicago for the denoument of all that political palpitation in the all too rapid breakdown of the War On Poverty. Lemann makes more of people than of policy; if this is not the best history of the War as a government program, it is certainly the best account of its human creation, its human frustration, and its human compassion.
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Awards

LA Times Book Prize (Finalist — History — 1991)
Robert F. Kennedy Book Award (Honorable Mention — 1992)
Hillman Prize (Book — 1991)

Language

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